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Live Thanksgiving Blog: Let the Games Begin

Calling It a Night | 10:48 p.m. Exhausted, they fall into bed for a few restless hours of sleep.

Dressed turkeys.

Getting Them Dressed | 10:40 p.m. I decided to rub my little twins with salt and herbs and let them sit overnight. It’s a method I picked up from Judy Rogers, who owns Zuni Café in San Francisco.

I think these heritage birds have a good layer of fat, and lots of good muscle from running around in the fields of Kansas for nine months or so. No brine needed. Not that there’s anything wrong with brining, of course. Though Harold McGee differs.

I have to remember to rinse the salt in the morning and let them air dry for a couple of hours or my gravy will be lousy.

As far as other turkey preparations, I turn to Jason Perlow, one of the founders of eGullet and the subject of a story I wrote on food bloggers who get healthy. In his blog, Off the Broiler, he points up some elaborate turkey prep festivities:

“See this yet?” he writes. “He sous vides a freaking turkey in butter.”

Jason, for his part, is doing this with a 14-pound turkey:

“We started marinating our turkey last night… we deboned it, slathered it with garlic mojo and trusssed it. gonna smoke it on the weber and turning carcass into soup.”

The Prep Continues | 10:31 p.m. My brother tackles the shrimp.

Shrimp get pickled.

My little turkeys.

My Birds | 10:19 p.m. So I’m about to prep the turkeys. I am cooking two little ones this year. They’re about 9 1/2 pounds each… Like little turkey earrings.

I ordered them from Frank Reese, who raised them on his Good Shepherd Ranch about an hour dead north of Wichita. His partner, Brian Anselmo, died in his sleep earlier this fall from asthma-related causes. Together they raised about 12,000 birds, most of them Narragansett or bourbon reds or Bronze.

The work Frank is doing to preserve turkey genetics matters. The turkeys aren’t cheap, but it seems like a good way to spend money this year.

Now, my boss, Mr. Pete Wells, has ordered a heritage bird this year, too. He’s got a Narragansett, which is from Rhode Island, like him. But he totally out-localed me and ordered it from Veritas Farms in New Paltz. They are $7.50 a pound.

Picking where I am getting my turkey is a big deal. I like a narrative with my bird. Some people like value, and go for the supermarket bird. Others want big ones with a good pedigree. (A friend is handling a 24-pound bird this year even though she has maybe half a dozen people to feed.)

What’s your bird story?

Thanksgiving With Michael Pollan | 9:48 p.m. A reader asked what Michael Pollan is going to have for Thanksgiving. He just wrote in to tell us. Here is the report. (Remember, you saw it here first on the New York Times Live Thanksgiving Blog!):

“My mom is cooking, though I’m doing the Brussels sprouts — the ones where you cut them and half and caramelize them, with pignolis. Mom’s making a (local) turkey with cornbread stuffing, spinach gratin, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with garlic and oil, and turnip puree. For dessert: pecan and chocolate pie. She’s an amazing cook and this is my favorite meal of the year, closely followed by the leftover lunch the next day.

What Others Are Doing | 8:28 p.m. My friend from Utah sent her list for the night:

flip turkey in brine

cook sausage with mirepoix for stuffing

iron tablecloth

You can tell she went to culinary school because she uses the phrase “mirepoix.” Always a dead giveaway.

Picture Perfect Pie | 7:30 p.m.

Pumpkin pie.

Help Has Arrived | 7:06 p.m. I now have two more people to help get things ready. It’s a great relief to have some assistance with the prep. Again, I remind you that the more you do tonight, the easier tomorrow will be. Resist the couch and the remote. We have miles to go before we sleep.

My prep list for tonight (minus all the stuff I have forgotten):

Make cranberry sauce

Pickle shrimp

Prep bread for stuffing

Give turkeys a salt rub (more on the turkey back story later tonight)

Start stock

Give brother more wine

Bathe baby

Give sick partner cold medicine

Don’t freak out

This is shaping up to be an awesome night. What’s your list looking like?

The Night Before | 6:40 p.m. So here is the question: What to have for dinner the night before Thanksgiving? I have my brother from Boston and my niece from Mt. Holyoke arriving in a few minutes. (The brother is not the father of the niece. He is the uncle of the niece. Confused? Me too. Will post org chart of Thanksgiving guests later…)

I was going to get all chef-y on them and roast some delicata squash and fry some Italian sausage and make a little sauce for some good pasta I have. I was going to finish the dish with a little balsamic and some parm and serve a green salad. Sounds good, right?

Well, I am so in the weeds with early prep at the moment that cooking dinner would send me over the edge. I would get cranky fast. And no one likes Cranky Kim.

Instead, I will do what the former Dining editor of the Times, Kathleen McElroy, does the night before Thanksgiving. I will order some good Asian soup, preferably with seafood. We’ll likely go Chinese, since there is a reliable place down the street that brings the order before you hang up the phone. But will they be slammed tonight? Does everyone in New York order Chinese take-out the night before Thanksgiving?

Averting Disaster | 6:16 p.m. So my guest from New Jersey, the one with the Broadway musician husband and the 19-month-old baby, e-mailed to report that contrary to the concerns of people who have commented about them on this blog, her pie is coming along fine despite severe challenges: “The crust is in the pan and chilling before baking. The babe did not want to take her nap three hours ago and is now sacked out on my lap. I need to move her to start baking the pie crust, which, as you may know, is more delicate than moving the pie crust.”

She goes on: “I’m picking up (my husband) at the train at 6:28 and even though I did my shopping yesterday at our amazing suburban supermarket, I didn’t realize that two tablespoons of orange rind means four oranges, so if he can’t hit a bodega, we’re making another stop.”

She also mentioned that the oven had been left on “broil” mode, something she realized just in time to avert pie disaster.

Stay tuned…

Pie Problems?! | 6:00 p.m. I think the Marian recipe has a glitch! It has too much liquid for one Cuisinart! Milk all over counter. Ship sinking… must… save… pie.

Starting the Pie | 5:42 p.m.

I am trying to get a jump on things. Remember: the more you do tonight, the less you have to do tomorrow.

So before the first wave of out-of-town family arrives, I figured I’d get my pumpkin pie done. The New Jersey couple is bringing the other one, and who knows what it will be. I am just plowing ahead with mine, using a recipe from the Times circa 1993.

The great Marian Burros, who had been a Times food writer for more years than she wants to say, took a buy-out earlier this year. She was long a leader in the New York Times Thanksgiving coverage and we miss her a lot, especially at this time of year. As an ode to our food writing sister, I am doing a pumpkin pie with a graham cracker crust that appeared as part of her long-running ‘Eat Well’ column.

The recipe is a lighter version of the traditional, and it calls for more egg whites than eggs and two percent milk. Now, I know trying to lighten up a recipe or two on Thanksgiving might seem like folly, but I like the idea of mixing the heavy with the light. And I like the idea of having a little bit of my pal at the table.

One cool thing is that I am using two percent from Milk Thistle Farm in Ghent, NY. It comes in these cool bottles and the two percent is as rich as some whole milk. We get it at the Grand Army Greenmarket.

My kitchen.

Setting the Stage | 5:19 p.m. OK, so let me set the physical scene for Thanksgiving. First, I am cooking almost everything (with help from a few key stakeholders – see my story in the Dining section today) in my kitchen. You can see a picture of it here. It’s in the back of our apartment, which is near but not in the historic section of Brownstone Brooklyn. The back door opens up into our little urban backyard.

As the astute blog reader will immediately note, it is not some huge and gorgeous rambling country kitchen ready for lush magazine photo shoots and TV crews. Nor is it a sleek Manhattan masterpiece all full of marble and Miele and maids. I’m just a straight-up newspaper food reporter, living with another journalist who is taking time off to care for our daughter, who is about to have her first Thanksgiving.

It is just a kitchen, and I like it a lot. And at least it’s nicer than Mark Bittman’s. (And of course it doesn’t look like that right now. You think I was going to show you my messy kitchen?)

Shopping Report | 2:56 p.m. Have you shopped for Thanksgiving yet?

I had to run out and get a couple of things I forgot today, namely shrimp (d’oh!) for the appetizers and some more lemons because I didn’t read the pickled shrimp recipe all the way to the end. It’s in today’s Dining section as an offering from Julia Moskin, who explains why appetizers on Thanksgiving matter after all.

Anyway, things seemed oddly quiet out there in the grocery shopping world. Is this the calm before the storm? A friend called in earlier today and offered a front line day-before-Thanksgiving shopping report. He is having Thanksgiving with his parents in Manhattan, and had shopped at Fairway on the Upper West Side: “I got there at 8:10 a.m. and you could already feel the humidity building,” he said. “There were no actual fights among people. People did have those tight, stressed faces, but they were getting along.”

I was among the clever who decided to do most of my shopping Tuesday morning, and then go into work late. I figured the rain that day would also work in my favor. As I mentioned, I am so clever. Just like the other 100,000 other really clever people who packed into the Park Slope Food Coop with me yesterday morning.

People who don’t live in New York City need to understand that shopping here is a lot like foraging for dinner in the woods, except instead of getting eaten by a bear you risk getting hit by a cab. It can be cruel and competitive. There are no supermarkets like I knew in my suburban, Midwest childhood, with their big, wide, comfy aisles and delicious, obscenely large parking lots. There are no teenagers to carry groceries to the car. You’re on your own, with a metro card, skinny aisles and tough clerks who really don’t care to hear about it — no matter what “it” is.

I belong to a food coop in Brooklyn because it is the closest to the produce-forward grocery stores I loved to shop at when I lived in Northern California (Berkeley, to be specific). I have to work there for a few hours about once a month, but in exchange I get less expensive food. And what food it is. We have local produce from New York farms, meat from pastured animals, great dairy products and bread from some of New York’s best bakers. But we also have those important, mainstream grocery items like Fantastik cleaning spray, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Grape-Nuts.

I supplement with visits to specialty shops, the occasional bodega run and Fresh Direct orders, which delivers groceries that you have ordered on the Internet right to your apartment. This is a key service in New York. But it also kills some of the low-impact sustainable crunchy goodwill I am earning from belonging to the coop.

This year my turkeys have a mixed carbon footprint, too. I got them shipped all the way from Kansas. But I had my reasons. More on the turkeys later today.

But back to shopping. Get out there and report back, so the procrastinators and time-pressed among us can know what to expect. My friend who shopped Fairway this morning has a theory that 5 p.m. today might be the perfect time to shop.

“People will have already shopped to avoid the Wednesday night crowds, and I’ll bet unless you want something really exotic, the stores will be stocked enough,” he said.

Anyone who ventures out to shop later this afternoon, please post your own field reports. And if anyone ventures out to the Berkeley Bowl today, say hello for me.

(Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

From Soup to Nuts | 12:15 p.m. Hello and welcome to my Thanksgiving.

For the next 24 hours (give or take some time to sleep and change the baby) I’ll be blogging about my Thanksgiving preparation and final execution. If my turkey (or in this case, turkeys) ends up dry, you’ll know about it. If my brother once again sends me to the bathroom in tears, you’ll know about that, too.

Along the way, readers will be able to share their thoughts and tips about the biggest cooking event of the year.

So if your family gets to be too much, feel free to sneak away to the computer and add a comment below.

At the end of this live blog, which hopefully will be around 3 p.m. on Thursday when dinner is on the table, I hope to have accomplished what I think we all want on this day: really good food, the warmth of our family and friends and a feeling of gratitude for what we have.

Or not. At this point, it’s all up in the air.

Here’s my menu. A lot of the recipes are from the Times’s Dining section, years past and present. We’ve posted links to some of them in case you get inspired.

This is a great idea! I’m looking forward to keeping up on your progress. My wife and I completed “the big shop” this morning. This afternoon we will make turkey stock (for gravy), black olive roll dough, and linzer torte crust. In-laws coming over for a casual dinner this evening – lucky for me, I like my in-laws.

This all sounds lovely, but wouldn’t you rather have an unplugged Thanksgiving? It’s sad to think that folks will either be blogging or online reading blogs, rather than spending time with friends & family on the holiday. I think with the possible exception of emergency recipe research, I will try to have an internet moratorium until Thursday night.

This could be rather entertaining to read. One inquiry which I would like to post is to hear of the ‘interesting’ dishes – be they side or main – that guests bring to the the Thanksgiving Table. As this Holiday more than any is menu based, I will be interesting to hear of the range of deviations that occur – for example – I have just been informed that one of our guests will be bringing and Enchilada Lasagna – though it will have organic beef – to share with the traditional turkey and cranberry sauce.

I hope a very nice dinner for you all.
But, i must say that is terrible that schools of high-class, socialites, shoppings-centers, and others, here in Brazil, are trying to bring this celebration into our lives,as they are doing also with “Halloween”. Our people doesnt know anything about this celebrations. Pure commerce. And to eat turkey is very uncommon for us. Could we say that is the “cultural blobalization”? Even Santa Klaus, here is a “kind of clown”, when Xtamas arrives, we are in plenty summer, with 40 degress celsius, and he appears covered with “cotton” pretending to be “snow”. So, soon we will be chasing turkeys, on our courtyards. Regards, Mário Roitman

I look forward to your play by play color analysis of the “Thanksgiving Bowl”. My husband and I will be spending the holiday with his parents and innocent witnesses that we use as human shields from too much parental/child upheaval that most certainly raises its ugly head during every holiday season.

Hey, with a guest list like yours, assuming they will help in the kitchen, we shouldn’t be hearing much in the way of irretrievable disasters or less-than-delicious outcomes. Your brother, however, is another story. Just let us know if he even starts getting annoying and we’ll virtually punch him in his cyber nose!

Have fun, Kim! We miss you out here in SF, but glad to hear you’re all doing well in Brooklyn. Enjoy those biscuits–I was lucky enough to snag one (with country ham) when Scott was making them at the Slow Food event here over Labor Day, and it was absolutely great.
All the best,
Stephanie Rosenbaum

After all that heavy eating is done, some exercise is in order.
Why not head down with your children in tow, to The Lower East Side for a fabulous walking tour of the nabe!
LoVer East Side Tours (a really cool group) has a special kids’ tour scheduled for this Friday at 11:00 am.

Thanks Kim, for giving some of us a second T-day activity. But please do set the stage. Where is dinner? How many guests? Which aunt will try to add more seasoning to the stuffing? And most importantly, what is back story of brother-of-Kim??

Hi there! I am home bound until I learn to walk WELL again and I want to join in the fun! Typing with most of my fingers!! There IS life after a stroke. Please have a wonderful dinner, all you friends I have not met! This ambrosia is seriously good.

Nanny’s Ambrosia

You fine tune it to which ingredient you like best. For example, I put more mandarin orange slices than pineapple. Or you can put the same amounts of everything. this salad is so pretyy and colorful and tasty.

Drain the juice off the fruit and save, in case you need to put a little more in to make it more moist.I get “in its own juice”, so I can drink it! Or you can bake chicken with the mandarin orange juice and a little soy sauce and a tad of honey. Good!

.Ingredients:

Mandarin orange slices ( canned not fresh)
pineapple chunks ( canned)
seedless grapes ( red or green)
coconut flakes in package
baby marshmallows( use at least half the package or if you are feeling reckless, you can use the whole package!!)

jar of red marischino cherries sliced in half. ( for color and the almond flavor, drained) If you put the whole jar in, you turn the whole bowl of ingredients pink, ask me how I know this!)( Duh!)( 1969 mistake in Carrollton, Georgia, pink fruit salad!!)

pecan pieces… they are expensive, so you can skip if you want, but pecans are the most tasty nut of all. Pecans make walnuts taste like tree bark!
Light or regular sour cream but not fat free, which is nasty. A carton of 16 oz will be enough.

It is good to make this fruit salad at least a few hours ahead, or the night before, so everything has a chance to chill and marinate. As you can see, to buy the whole works is expensive, but worth it once a year! ( or twice) Love, Mom aka Phyllis

I caught a person, who will not be named, running his or her finger around the empty fruit salad bowl one year!!! So make a lot! This salad is pretty in a clear glass bowl like what you would put egg nog in. . Bye!!

It looks like you could use a little bit of a kick to your menu list. For your mashed potatoes, I would recommend using red bliss instead of Yukon. It is tastier and also allows you to keep the skin on, which saves a considerable amount of time. Also try adding some fresh rosemary and use buttermilk instead of whole milk. For the green beans make sure to use plenty of fresh garlic and salt and fresh pepper. Changes to those two dishes alone should be enough to add some much needed flavor. Good luck!